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In Defence of Attitudinal Christianity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
In 1968, R. M. Hare gave a series of lectures at the Yale Divinity School, two of which were published subsequently under the title ‘The Simple Believer’.1 In those published lectures Hare enlarged upon and defended the view, which he shares with R. B. Braithwaite, that Christian commitment is best understood as being what I will call a particular world-attitude. In brief, Hare described the Christian world-attitude as consisting, first, of the adoption of a set of practical-normative standards, prescriptions as to what we should do and be, for instance, in our various cognitive and moral endeavours. Central to this overall Christian picture of human flourishing, including cognitive flourishing, is the notion of love (agape). The Christian world-attitude, in addition, involves the belief that the efforts that we make to realize these standards are not pointless in the world as it is. This faith, this refusal to doubt in connection with both moral and cognitive endeavours, is naturally expressed in religious terms, perhaps most obviously in terms of trust in the providence of God.
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References
page 11 note 1 Hare, R. M., ‘The Simple Believer’, in Outka, Gene and Reeder, John P. Jr, eds., Religion and Morality, pp. 393–427 (Anchor Books, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1973).Google Scholar
page 14 note 1 Barbour, Ian G., Myths, Models and Paradigms (Harper and Row, New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Mac-Cormac, Earl R., Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion (Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1976)Google Scholar; Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976).Google Scholar
page 17 note 1 The work most commonly cited is Lakatos, Imre, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programme’, in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, London, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 20 note 1 Two of Sellars' most important essays are his ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ and ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, both reprinted in Sellars, Wilfrid, Science, Perception and Reality (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963).Google Scholar For a collection of informative discussions of Sellars' philosophy see Delaney, C. F. et al. , The Synoptic Vision: Essays on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1977).Google Scholar
page 23 note 1 Sellars distinguishes broadly physicalistic from narrowly physicalistic as follows: to be broadly physicalistic is to belong to a spatio-temporal-nomological framework of scientific explanation, while to be narrowly physicalistic is to belong to a set of predicates adequate to the theoretical description of non-living matter. See Sellars, Wilfrid, ‘The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem’, reprinted in O'Connor, John, ed., Modern Materialism: Readings on Mind-Body Identity, p. 140 (Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York, 1969).Google Scholar
page 24 note 1 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979).Google Scholar
page 24 note 2 For example, Ibid. p. 201.
page 25 note 1 Much of what Rorty has to say in this connection is elaboration of Sellars' contention that‘…in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says’, Sellars, Wilfrid, op. cit. p. 169.Google Scholar Rorty himself says, ‘I would argue that the importance of Sellars' approach to epistemiology is that he sees the true and interesting irreducibility in the area not as between one sort of particular (mental, intentional) and another (physical) but as between descriptions on the one hand and norms, practices, and values on the other’, Rorty, , op. cit. p. 180, footnote 13.Google Scholar Rorty's position is that two ways of viewing ourselves, as objects of explanation and as moral agents concerned to justify our beliefs and actions, do not need to be synthesized, Ibid. p. 256, and detailed discussion in chapters VII and VIII. As Rorty says of Sellars and Quine, his own position is that of ‘… a protest against an archetypal philosophical problem: the problem of how to reduce norms, rules, and ustifications to facts, generalizations, and explanations’. And the refusal to offer such reductions ‘…is just to say that justification must be holistic’, Ibid. p. 180.